It isn't just a French issue, the whole of the European Union has Data Protection Law based on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive And the categories of "Sensitive" data are similar across the EU. Ethnicity, religion, health and Political opinion being perhaps the most relevant to us. I think that not all countries defined criminal record as Sensitive, and the UK apparently opted out of the philosophical opinions bit, but the legislation across Europe has commonalities, though it would be stretching a point to describe it as harmonised. But the good thing is that it isn't as simple as a ban on processing such data, there are various exemptions, and I'm pretty sure they include if the individual has made that information publicly known. So French citizens are allowed to know what political party their President is a member of, and they can't be prosecuted simply for categorising the Pope as a Roman Catholic. However just because somebody's parents, siblings and children have self identified as Jewish doesn't mean that they also have disclosed that information about themselves. Now that we have chapters in some of these countries it might be worth starting a dialogue with the various Information Commissioners (apologies if this is already happening). I would hope that our existing policies largely cover us here, provided that is that we editors living in the EU treat what they consider to be "sensitive" data about living people as contentious data. But there could be some grey areas, for example if no EU source is covering something then an EU editor sourcing a fact from a reliable source in the US might be in difficulty. Especially if that "fact" was something that EU sources weren't covering because they had no legal basis to do so. I would hope that we could get some guidelines agreed between European chapter and their national Information Commissioners, and that those guidelines could then be communicated to editors; Both to reassure people as to where the boundaries are and so that we in Europe know to leave certain things to our colleagues outside the EU. WSC On 19 August 2012 13:23, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote: